I love Shadow Labyrinth. And judging by theOpen Criticconsensus, I loved it a fair bit more than every other reviewer. This doesn’t surprise me. Even as I was writing my review I expected it to be a pretty divisive game. It’s challenging in a way that modern Metroidvanias aren’t willing to be, and while that means it will alienate some people, I appreciate its commitment to honoring Namco’s arcade game history, both in theme and in difficulty.
I grew up playing unfair games, so while I’m glad modern experiences are more approachable, I have a lot of nostalgia for the days when games felt actively hostile towards players. Games today are meant to be beaten. They’re designed to deliver just enough friction to make you feel challenged, but not enough to make you want to turn the game off and play something more approachable.
Most games couldn’t get away with what Shadow Labyrinth does, but given how much fealty it shows to the early days of this medium, I can respect that Shadow Labyrinth doesn’t respect me. There are plenty of examples I could point to throughout Shadow Labyrinth to demonstrate how unfairly hard it is, but the best example comes at the end, when you have to face eight of the game’s hardest bosses back to back.
The Most Ridiculous Boss Fight Gauntlet Ever
It took me around 30 hours to complete Shadow Labyrinth, and seven of those hours were spent on this final boss rush. I reviewed the game, so giving up wasn’t an option, but even if I were just playing it for fun (you give up playing games for fun when you start writing about them) I still think I would have stuck with it. Partly because I’d already come so far and overcome so much, but mostly because I knew theycouldbe beaten, it just took me a long time to figure out how.
The first four bosses can be taken down in any order. You’ll start by completing a mini puck maze (the best four in the game I might add) before taking on each of the four parasites that created the G-Hosts, now in their final form. These four fights are mechanically diverse, designed to test your skills with all of Shadow Labyrinth’s combat and traversal mechanics - and they’re really,reallyhard.
One is all about landing perfect parries to deflect this boss’s attacks and open it up to counterattacks. If the parry window in Shadow Labyrinth is more than five frames, I’d be shocked. It’sextraordinarilytight, so you have to nail it to beat this guy.
Youcandodge through his attacks instead, but his body is so large that you have to stand as close as you possibly can to him without actually touching him and then dodge at the exact moment he attacks, so you might as well learn the parry timing instead.
The other three bosses are more manageable, but will still take a lot of practice. One is a wizard that can duplicate itself and fire a barrage of orbs at you that are increasingly difficult to dodge. One is a flying dinosaur-like creature that electrifies the floor, forcing you to use your grapple hook to stay airborne throughout the entire fight.
I spent a few hours taking these bosses down one by one and felt a lot of relief when it was over, but I had no idea what I was in for next.
This Is What Hell Looks Like
Once you’ve defeated the four parasites, it’s finally time to take on Gand, a rogue AI and the main villain of Shadow Labyrinth. As you might expect from a final boss, this is a multi-stage fight with no checkpoints. If you’re able to’t beat the whole thing, you’ll have to restart from the beginning.
It begins with a double boss fight. The AI first unleashes a pair of drones each with their own move sets and attack patterns. There are a lot of attacks to learn in this fight, but luckily they have a consistent pattern of moves that you can learn how to avoid.
This being the first boss in the chain, I havea lotof experience with these two.
Gand is the easiest fight once you learn how to avoid taking damage from them, but that requires you to repeat the fight over and over until you’ve memorized exactly where to stand, when to jump, and where your openings to attack are.
Once they’re defeated, Puck does what Puck wants to do and consumes them to absorb their power. Unfortunately, our nemesis predicted this and upon eating them Puck transforms into Gaia and attacks the swordsman.
The next stage is fighting your own mech.
Gaia is fast, ruthless, and will keep you on your toes with lots of different attacks. Unfortunately you don’t recover HP in between fights, so you’ll have to use whatever you have left from the first battle. The hardest part about this fight and the ones that come after it is the fact that you have to start all the way over when you die, making it more difficult and time consuming to learn the counters. When Gaia is almost dead it unleashes a beam of energy that kills you in one hit. This got me the first time, and a handful times after that too.
When you beat Gaia, fight number three is a battle against four flying orbs, representing the four ghosts. If you manage to complete both of the secret mazes associated with each ghost, they will start with half health.
You do recover your HP before this fight starts, so if you come in prepared by doing all of the mazes, this is the easiest one.
Finally, it’s time to take on Gand himself. This fight is brutal, not just because it’s the fourth in one in the sequence that will send you all the way back to the start if you die, but because it uses a mechanic that no other boss in the game ever uses. Gand’s weak spot is protected by a shell that only Gaia can break, so for the first stretch of the fight you may’t hurt him at all. After you dodged his attacks for a while he will send out two floating enemies.
Killing both of them and consuming the orbs they drop will fill your Gaia gauge full, allowing you to transform and break the bosses armor. The armor will periodically repair, this process has to be repeated every time you want to turn into Gaia again.
It doesn’t sound all that complicated when I explain it, but I didn’t know any of this going into the fight, and I died many, many times before I figured out all the mechanics and all of his patterns.
Every time I did, it was another 10 minutes of precision combat, parries, and perfect dodges just to get back to this fight. It’s mentally exhausting and murder on the thumbs, but after seven hours, I finally saw credits.
I would not want every game to end with such a miserable hill to climb, but for Shadow Labyrinth, it’s perfect. After how hard the game is, anything less than this at the end would have been a let down.
I hated it when I was stuck in the middle of it, but looking back I appreciate the design and mechanics of all eight bosses, and the confidence Bandai Namco had to create such a mean-spirited finale for this game.
